My Dad was a scientist and a teacher. He spent more than 35 years teaching high-school lunkheads like me the wonders of physics, chemistry, geology and sometimes even physiology.
Yesterday would have been his 78th birthday. “Would have been” because, come December 14, it will be three years since he passed away.
Among other things, my Dad instilled in me a love and respect for science. While I didn’t quite manage to follow in his footsteps, I carry with me the deep curiosity and sense of wonder at the universe around me that I developed through his teaching. This is a big place that we all live in, and isn’t it truly marvelous (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) that we will never, ever have all of the answers to all of our questions?
So yesterday I spent some quiet time reflecting on the state of science and scientific inquiry here in the American corner of the world. It’s pretty depressing, frankly: Science as a political football; “science” characterized as the evil, polar opposite of “religion” in the popular press. It’s an over-reaction, I know, because the situation is not the same in the big, wide world – but sometimes it seems to me that the popular perception of science is waging a precarious battle against the onset of a new, politicized Dark Ages in what was once the world’s leading nation of scientific achievement.
Within my own, small personal orbit I know people who consider “science” to be some sort of multi-tentacled monster, conjured from the sin of disbelief and destined to be the doom of mankind. All I can do is wonder: When did ignorance become such a respected civic virtue?
There are monsters, of course. But “science” isn’t one of them.
The monsters are us.
